A police sergeant who claims she was branded a rat for filing a joint sexual-harassment complaint with her former partner – a lieutenant now suing several high-ranking cops – broke down as she told a federal jury that reporting misconduct is taboo.

“You don’t go to Internal Affairs. You just don’t do it,” Lori Fazzolari said, her eyes welling with tears. “It follows you your whole career. I’m counting down the years I have left on this job.”

Fazzolari testified yesterday as a witness for her friend and former partner Michele Jarman-Brown, who has filed a lawsuit that accuses fellow cops of perusing pornography and drinking in a Brooklyn South narcotics wiretap office between 1996 and 1997.

Fazzolari said she and Jarman-Brown held off on filing a complaint as long as they could – but when Jarman-Brown found a semen-stained copy of Hustler magazine in her desk drawer in August 1997 “it was the last straw.”

“We were crying. We knew that was the end of it. What more were we going to wait for?” Fazzolari said.

After the two women went to the Internal Affairs Bureau, they were bounced from one assignment to another, Fazzolari said.

“Everyone was saying, ‘We just got two rats transferred to the office,’ ” the shaken sergeant said.